Surprise of the Century

Nothin like best friends...captions: me, Alex, Jeana and Emma on the hammock in the patio of my house; all 5 of us in Tacna's Plaza de Armas

Hello friends and family,

So, I had kind of an interesting week last week. And by interesting I mean the most incredible surprise of my life. Let me set the scene for you...

It was Monday afternoon April 4th, approximately 1:45pm, and I'm in the middle of teaching 3rd grade just like any other Monday afternoon. They were being a little unruly as per usual so I was probably yelling at someone and starting to get kind of frustrated, when suddenly my housemate Ashlen (who also teaches at Miguel Pro) appears in the doorway, with a look on her face like she was fighting back tears, and says, "Mo can I talk to you for a minute?" I seriously thought someone had died, she looked so upset, and so I asked her what was wrong, my first thought being I can't leave these hellions by themselves unless it's a real emergency. She didn't tell me, just responded with, "I just really need to talk to you, can you please come out here?" So I followed her outside and around the corner of the primary building. As soon as I stepped outside I saw something resembling Emma Pace's fish pillow that she takes with her everywhere, poking its head around the corner of the building. I remember thinking to myself, "Hm that's weird. Somebody here has almost the exact same fish pillow as Emma." Then as I rounded the corner, wondering what the heck Ashlen needed to talk to me about so urgently, I found none other than Emma Pace (it was in fact her fish pillow), Jeana Greco, Alex Swiatocha and Avanti Peters standing there, right in front of my face, at my school in Tacna, Peru!! You might ask if I was expecting a visit in Tacna from my best friends? NO! I had absolutely no freaking idea that any of them was coming! I mean I was hoping that someone would come visit me at some point this year, but up to now no one had really said anything to me about making travel plans so I didn't think anyone was gonna come. Yet there they were...

I didn't even cry or hug them right away when I first saw them I was in such shock. I just stopped dead in my tracks and kept yelling at them, "But how did you GET here?!" (Seamus was actually filming me at this point so I'll try to put that video on here someday). I was so confused, trying to piece things together in my head but couldn't do it. Eventually I was able to move again and we all hugged and cried and it was beautiful, and Seamus and Ashlen told me they had already planned things for the rest of my classes for that day so I was free to go be with my friends. It turns out that the 4 of them started talking about coming to visit me when they saw each other over Christmas, and pretty much as soon as my parents got back from their trip in early January my friends got in touch with them to start plotting. I was on Mes de Misión at the time so they had to book their tickets without consulting me first, and then they just decided not to tell me at all. At some point in February they got in touch with my community mates, and then everyone was in on the secret except me. I have to say, everyone involved did an incredible job of keeping the whole thing a secret, from my community mates and other friends in Tacna who found out, to my parents, to all my Holy Cross friends who knew. I've been in touch with all of them since January, and even asked them all directly if they were still thinking about coming to visit, and no one let on a thing. I was absolutely, 100% in the dark.

SO needless to say last week was wonderful. My friends' visit was very quick, they were just here Monday to Thursday then headed back to Lima to spend time with Jenny and Fernando, but it was so, so cool and special to have them here in Tacna with me, even just for a few days, to share with them, in a much more real way than emails and skype calls can express, what it is I've been doing here for the past year and a half. They spent a whole day at school with me, following me around to all of my classes, and that was really fun for me to play show and tell with them and watch them interact with my students. I think they also appreciated the chance to see a "day in the life of JV Mo," in action both at work and at home in community. They got to spend a fair amount of time with my community mates too which was also really cool for me, weird how my universes were suddenly colliding, but really awesome too to look down the table and see Jeana deep in conversation with Seamus, or Ashlen talking running with Alex. Seamus and Ashlen were nice enough to cover all my classes on Wednesday so I was able to take the whole crew on a little adventure to Tarata/Ticaco (the closest towns to us up in the mountains, where I did Mes de Misión this year). We had a really nice time admiring some more typical Andean landscape, hiking the Inca Trail and swimming in the thermal baths. On their last day here, Alex and Avanti spent most of the morning with our neighbors and good friends Charo and Fancy Carmen (who also cook us lunch everyday) and they helped Charo make causa, one of my favorite Peruvian dishes, while Emma and Jeana hung out at school with me. I escaped my afternoon classes to enjoy my last precious hours with everyone, and then I took them to the airport and we said goodbye. Just as quickly and unexpectedly as they were here in Habitat, they're gone again, back to their lives in each of their respective corners of the States, and now the whole thing kind of seems like a dream. As my life also went immediately back to normal, I keep asking myself, "Did that really happen? Were they actually here, just a week ago?" Yes they were. And yes, without a doubt, I have the absolute best friends on the face of this earth. No question.

Feeling blessed in friendship, both near and far...I love you guys!!

En paz from Tacna,

Mo

A few pictures from the surprise visit: (above) Emma and Jeana with the 1st graders in the chapel (they're some of my most affectionate and favorite students); All 5 of us at the end of our hike in Tarata; out to pizza with my 4 community mates in Tacna; with Emma and Jeana at my house in Habitat; and the 3 of us doing our "road trip pose" in Tarata.

Mes de Misión, Take 2

I just wrote this reflection on Mes de Misión for a JVC publication, so I thought I'd post it on here too in case you want to read a little more about what we Tacna JV's do every January...

Every year the Tacna JV’s (and this year the crew headed to Andahuaylillas too!) accompany groups of secondary students from two of the schools where we teach on a month-long summer service experience called Mes de Misión (Mission Month). Fr. Fred (the legendary Jesuit who founded both Cristo Rey and Colegio Miguel Pro) started Mes de Misión in the 70's after a severe earthquake/landslide in the northern mountain region of Peru left hundreds of people dead, injured, homeless, and orphaned. Fred took a group of Cristo Rey student volunteers during their summer vacation to help animate the people there, lift their spirits, and bring whatever relief they could after the disaster. Year after year they continued these voluntary service trips in various poor areas of Peru, and several years later Fred made the experience a mandatory part of the Cristo Rey education. When he founded Miguel Pro in 1992, Mes de Misión was included as one of the hallmarks of a child’s education here. Now both schools participate in a Mes de Misión every summer during the month of January for students who are entering into 4th year of secondary (they’d be rising 10th graders in the States), and the JVs have become an integral part of the experience as we provide a lot of support and man/woman power to the teachers who run it.
This year Miguel Pro (accompanied by Seamus, Rose, Ashlen, Jessica, Mallory and me) did its MdM in a small town in the mountain region of Tacna called Ticaco. For the entire month we stayed at the school there, sleeping on the floor of empty classrooms with our 28 students, and working during the day. Ticaco is beautiful, surrounded by mountains, rivers, and breathtaking views (definitely a welcome change from the sand dunes of Tacna) but it also sits at approximately 3200m above sea level so that meant doing manual labor at altitude, and huffing and puffing up the side of a mountain everyday (often with firewood on your back) to get back to the school. Being in the mountains in the middle of rainy season also meant pretty regular downpours every afternoon, really cold nights,and the coldest showers I have ever taken in my life. We took to only bathing every 2 or 3 days just because we couldn’t stand it-that water was so cold it made your head hurt!
There are tons of paths that lead from the pueblo down the mountain to all the farms where the people work, and those paths were full of rocks, so our job was to move them out of the way to make the walk a little easier for all the campesinos. It was a little boring and rather tedious work, but not particularly strenuous so we didn’t suffer too much. But probably the most memorable day for me was the day Seamus, Rose, Jess and I took our groups on a hunt to find firewood. The tiny “kitchen” at the school only had a wood-burning stove, so every couple days we had to bring wood back to cook with, and it was incredibly difficult to find. So one day our cook’s son led us to a river at the very bottom of the valley where he said we’d find tons of leña (firewood). It took us well over an hour just to get to the bottom, and the last half hour or so we were wading back and forth across the river, up and over huge rocks,over plants where we couldn’t tell if they were on solid ground or halfway under water to reach this giant tree that would supposedly provide us with days worth of firewood. Well we finally got there, tired, sweating, scraped, and with wet feet, and the boys went to work with the machetes while the rest of us attempted to craft devices to carry the wood out of plastic sacks, pieces of string, and long-sleeved shirts. We loaded up with as much as we could carry and then proceeded back through the river, over the rocks, and back up the entire mountain, breathing as if we had just run a marathon with sticks poking into the backs of our legs. When we finally made it back to school, unloaded our prized leña outside the kitchen and collapsed onto the ground, our cook looks at the pile of wood and says something along the lines of, “That’s all you brought? Well maybe it’ll last us 2 days.” What?! That meant after all that work, someone would have to go look again the next day. But I guess we learned to appreciate a little more what it means to live off the land-the work never ends! All in all the month was a success, the people of Ticaco were extremely appreciative of the work we did, and the kids learned a lot about hard work, living in community, and how to value the things they have at home. And I learned a lot too, mostly about my students whom I was able to see in a totally different context than I had known them all year in English class. A lot of my laziest and most difficult students actually turned out to be some of the hardest workers on MdM. There were definitely moments (a lot of them) when they tested my patience and drove me crazy, but I shared a lot of nice moments with them too, singing with them while they played guitar (I taught one of my kids "Ripple" by the Grateful Dead and the song from the movie Once, and I helped some of them compose their own song in English!) answering their questions about my family and life in the US, and listening to them talk about their families and hopes for the future. While it’s one of the harder things we have to do during our JVexperience here, I think Mes de Misión is also one of the most important, and one that we will definitely never forget.

Below are a few of my favorite pictures from this year's Mes de Misión.

1: All the JVs at 2 of our students' "quinceañero" (15th bday party), in our students' clothes that they made us wear to the party. Who knew we still fit into 15 year olds' jeans!

2: At one of the picturesque lookout spots in Ticaco.

3: The girls on our last day of work on the camino.

4: Sporting our new MdM t-shirts on our last day before coming home.

Reunions and Homecomings

Hola amigos!

Well after many travels and summer adventures with family, students, and friends, I'm finally back in Tacna for good. The past two months have been a whirlwind of experiences and emotions, full of reunions and so many wonderful people. At the end of December I enjoyed a very special visit from my family, and we spent Christmas here in Tacna with all my community mates and adoptive families and friends. After that we traveled to Cuzco for a week to check out all the Sacred Valley ruins, and of course Machu Picchu. Everything there was beautiful, absolutely breathtaking-they don't didn't name Machu Picchu one of the wonders of the world for nothing. After Cuzco we spent New Years in Lima and then parted ways again, as the McCarty clan traveled back to the States and I returned to Tacna. I was home for approximately half a day before Seamus, all the new female volunteers and I took off again for Mes de Misión with Miguel Pro (the month-long service trip we do every January with the high schoolers). The rest of the guys accompanied the Cristo Rey students on their Mes de Misión. Overall it was a successful month, exhausting and sometimes very frustrating, but also a really great opportunity to spend time with some of the kids I had all year in English class but in a totally different context and environment. More reflections on that month to come later...

After Mes de Misión we FINALLY had summer vacation, so this month for me has been full of catching up with all my friends and neighbors I'd been too busy to see since December, resting, a little traveling, and a much-needed retreat just across the border in Arica, Chile. 2 weeks ago I took a solo trip to Lima, just to get away and catch up on some R&R, and while I was there I was able to reunite with Cara and Nate, two of my community mates from last year who left at Christmastime (Nate is still traveling all around South America, and Cara is returning to Peru to do a 3rd year at the new site in Cuzco) and my dear friend Jenny from Holy Cross who has been living in Lima since July. It was so great to see all of them, and to have some alone time too after an entire month with 15 year olds and a whole year of being surrounded by people, both at school and at home. After that trip I went to Arica with a small group of colleagues for a 6-day (mostly) silent retreat. I say mostly because Peruvians are not very good at being silent so there were more than a few whispered jokes and conversations in the midst of my reflections.

As of yesterday I am back in Tacna again, this time for good, and it feels so nice to be back home again. I always love coming back to this place after extended times away because Habitat seems so peaceful after traveling, and I love that feeling of coming home to a place that, not so long ago, felt so strange and foreign, but now is as comfortable and familiar as if I had lived here my whole life. I love Tacna! Vacation has passed way too quickly so now I only have one precious week left to soak up the summer sun and get myself organized for another school year, but I'm really looking forward to my second year living in the Habitat/JV community and teaching at Miguel Pro so it'll be nice to get back into a routine again. I have literally hundreds of pictures I'm trying to organize from the past couple of months so hopefully later this week I can write about each of the major experiences I've had since my family's visit at the end of December with a few visuals for you all to enjoy.

But for now I'll leave you with one of my favorites from Mes de Misión of the JVs with our baby alpaca friend whom we named Albert. He had HUGE eyes, and was very affectionate. Also, one of all 9 of us the day we went to visit the boys at Cristo Rey's Mes de Misión. We hadn't seen each other in over a month, so that was a very happy reunion too. I hope you're all well and enjoying the new year so far. I was thinking of you all in a special way last week, since here in Peru they celebrate "Día de la Amistad" (Friendship Day) on Feb 14th instead of Valentine's Day. I'm grateful for each and every one of you and the friendship that you've blessed me with over the years. Take care and I promise to write/put up more pictures this week!! Chau, un besote!